Slow down world we want to get off? Well, no, not really. Given all the effort we put into marketing eantics and doing a good job for our clients it's nice to be getting a reputation for doing quality work at attractive prices, but, that said we have been "up it" of late, not just with new work but also doing a fair bit of firefighting....
Last week a dedicated server we manage died on us. The fault was on the motherboard so a new box was needed. We had backup so no big deal you'd think, but, proving that what can go wrong will go wrong, it turns out that that particular server had an IP address that we weren't able to use going forward. (This seems to be an issue with a number of servers provided by Donhost and folk will have to migrate their setups to new IP addresses in the coming months).
Anyway long and short of it was that we ended up with a server on a new IP address, which caused us a lot of DNS issues. So, whilst we got the server and the 200+ Dotnetnuke websites it supported back up the same day, it took considerably longer to inform clients of the need to make DNS changes to their domain names to point them at the new server.
The same week Fasthosts was on the end of a denial of service attack which resulted in their nameservers being blocked by a number of UK ISPs. We use Fasthosts for many of our smaller scale client websites; upshot was anyone accessing the web via one of the ISPs blocking Fasthosts nameservers couldn't connect to those websites. Thankfully Fasthosts resolved the problem fairly quickly.
Two major issues in a single week - not something we want to see repeated! This week we've been playing catchup on client projects, and I think we're just about there.
